ASSIGNMENT WORK
COURSE TITLE : CRITICAL TRANSACTIONS
COURSE CODE : LEC 5104
TOPIC : MIDDLE AND DARK AGES
PREPARED BY : MUHAMED SHEHIN T.V
IST SEMESTER ECL
CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF KERALA
SUBMITTED TO : SHALINI MADAM
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF KERALA
DATE : 10-09-2015
MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English became widespread and the printing press standardised the language. Between the 1470s and the middle of the following century there was a transition to early Modern English. In literary terms, the characteristics of the literary works written did not change drastically until the effects of the Renaissance and Reformed Christianity became more evident in the reign of King Henry VIII. There are three main categories of Middle English Literature: Religious, Courtly love, and Arthurian, though much of Geoffrey Chaucer's work stands outside these realms. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle.
After the Norman conquest of England, Law French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and society. The Norman dialects of the ruling classes mixed with the Anglo-Saxon of the people and became Anglo-Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into Middle English. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, Layamon wrote in Middle English. Other transitional works were popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament and courts of law. Early examples of Middle English literature are the Ormulum and Havelock the Dane. In the fourteenth century major works of English literature began once again to appear, including the works of Chaucer. The latter portion of the 14th century also saw not only the consolidation of English as a written language and a shift to secular writing. William Caxton printed four-fifths of his works in English, which helped to standardize the language and expand the vocabulary.
EARLY PERIOD
After the Norman conquest of England, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language continued in some monasteries but few literary works are known from this period. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, Law French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society.
As the invaders integrated, their language and literature mingled with that of the natives. The Norman dialects of the ruling classes became Anglo-Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into Middle English. Political power was no longer in English hands, so the West Saxon literary language had no more influence than any other dialect. Middle English literature is written, then, in the many dialects that correspond to the history, culture, and background of the individual writers.
It was with the fourteenth century that major works of English literature began once again to appear; these include the so-called Pearl Poet's Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Langland's political and religious allegory Piers Plowman; John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, the most highly regarded English poet of the Middle Ages, who was seen by his contemporaries as an English successor to the great tradition of Virgil and Dante.
The latter portion of the 14th century also saw not only the consolidation of English as a manuscript language, taking over from French or Latin in certain areas, but a paradigm shift from primarily theological or metaphysical subject matter to also include that of a more secular nature.
Vernacular book production saw a spurt in the amount of books being copied, both secular and religious. Thus, the latter portion of the 14th century can be seen as one of the most significant periods in the history of the English language.
Caxton and the English language
The first English printer, William Caxton, printed four-fifths of his works in English. He translated a large number of works into English; Caxton translated 26 of the titles himself. Caxton is credited with printing as many as 108 books, 87 of which were different titles. However, the English language was changing rapidly in Caxton's time and the works he was given to print were in a variety of styles and dialects. Caxton was a technician rather than a writer and he de Worde faced similar dilemmas.
Caxton is credited with standardising the English language (that is, homogenising regional dialects) through printing. This paved the way for the expansion of English vocabulary, the development of inflection and syntax and the ever-widening gap between the spoken and the written word.
THE DARK AGES
The Dark Ages is a historical term used originally for the Middle Ages, which underlines the cultural and economic decline that supposedly occurred in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. The label uses traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the "darkness" of the period with earlier and later periods of "light". The period is marked by a relative scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it unknown to historians. The term "Dark Age" derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a turbulent period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The term once characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages, or roughly the 6th to 13th centuries, as a period of intellectual darkness between extinguishing the "light of Rome" after the end of Late Antiquity, and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century. This definition is still widely used but increased recognition of the achievements of the Middle Ages has led to the label being restricted in scope. Since the 20th century, it is frequently applied to the earlier part of the era, the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century).However, many modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term altogether for its negative connotations, finding it out of place and inappropriate for any part of the Middle Ages.
The idea of a Dark Age evolved with the Italian scholar Petrarch in the 1330s, and was originally intended as a scathing criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. Petrarch regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity.Later historians expanded the term to refer to the transitional period between Roman times and the High Middle Ages (c. 11th–13th century), including the lack of Latin literature, and a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general.
Popular culture has further expanded on it as a vehicle to depict the early Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope.
HISTORY
The term "Dark Ages" originally was intended to denote the entire period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; the term "Middle Ages" has a similar motivation, implying an intermediate period between Classical Antiquity and the Modern era. In the 19th century scholars began to recognize the accomplishments made during the period, thereby challenging the image of the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and decay. Now the term is not used by scholars to refer to the entire medieval period; when used, it is generally restricted to the Early Middle Ages.
The rise of archaeology in the 20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments. Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being referred to. When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was at first kept, with all its critical undercurrents. On the rare occasions when the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" because of the lack of artistic and cultural output, including historical records, when compared with both earlier and later times.
The idea of a Dark Age originated with Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said: "Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom" Christian writers, including Petrarch himself had long used traditional metaphors of "light versus darkness" to describe "good versus evil". Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the "dark" age for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of "light" because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's time, allegedly lacking such cultural achievements, was seen as the age of darkness.
During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants wrote of the Middle Ages as a period of Catholic corruption. Just as Petrarch's writing was not an attack on Christianity per se — along with his humanism, he was deeply occupied with the search for God — neither was this an attack on Christianity: it was a drive to restore what Protestants saw as biblical Christianity.
The Magdeburg Centuries was a work of ecclesiastical history compiled by Lutheran scholars and published between 1559 and 1574. Devoting a volume to each century, it covered the first thirteen centuries of Christianity up to 1298. The work was virulently anti-Catholic. Identifying the Papacy as the Antichrist, it painted a "dark" picture of church history after the 5th century, characterizing it as "increments of errors and their corrupting influences".
In response to the Protestants, Roman Catholics developed a counter-image, depicting the High Middle Ages in particular as a period of social and religious harmony, and not "dark" at all. The most important Catholic reply to the Magdeburg Centuries was the Annales Ecclesiastici by Cardinal Caesar Baronius. Baronius was a trained historian who kept theology in the background and produced a work that the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1911 described as "far surpassing anything before his day" and that Acton regarded as "the greatest history of the Church ever written".The Annales, covering the first twelve centuries of Christianity up to 1198, was published in twelve volumes between 1588 and 1607. It was in Volume X that Baronius coined the term "dark age" for the period between the end of the Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first inklings of the Gregorian Reform under Pope Clement II in 1046.
In the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was widely used by historians. In 1860, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt delineated the contrast between the "dark ages" of the medieval period and the more enlightened period of the Renaissance, which had revived the cultural and intellectual achievements of antiquity. However, the early 20th century saw a radical re-evaluation of the Middle Ages, and with it a calling into question of the terminology of darkness, or at least of its pejorative use. Historian Denys Hay exemplified this when he spoke ironically of "the lively centuries which we call dark".
When the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, therefore, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us because of the paucity of historical records compared with both earlier and later times. The term is used in this sense (often in the singular) to reference the Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent Greek Dark Ages, the dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450-1863), and also a hypothetical Digital Dark Age which would ensue if the electronic documents produced in the current period were to become unreadable at some point in the future. Some Byzantinists have used the term "Byzantine Dark Ages" to refer to the period from the earliest Muslim conquests to about 800, because there are no extant historical texts in Greek from this period, and thus the history of the Byzantine Empire and formerly Byzantine territories that were conquered by the Muslims is poorly understood and must be reconstructed from other types of contemporaneous sources, such as religious texts. It is also known that very few Greek manuscripts were copied in this period, indicating that the 7th and 8th centuries, which were a period of crisis for the Byzantines because of the Muslim conquests, were also less intellectually active than other periods. The term "dark age" is not restricted to the discipline of history. Since the archaeological evidence for some periods is abundant and for others scanty, there are also archaeological dark ages.
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES ARE GENERALLY REFERRED TO AS THE DARK AGE
The Fall of the Great Roman Empire
Rome during this time was the greatest empire in the world. Its scope was very wide with the help of their great leaders such as Julius Caesar, Augustus Aurelius, and many other great Roman leaders. However, time came when there were no more leaders like them, Rome slow down and its economy and the whole system of the entire empire fell down. Many problems arise like no able leaders, corruption, civil wars, and most importantly was the barbarian invasions. These barbarian invasions of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc. from Germany and from North Europe just entered and invaded Rome when the empire itself was already weak. So, this event makes the Middle Ages dark because of so many chaos.
The Crusades
Crusades were also the Holy wars led by the popes in the Roman Empire with the aim of preserving Christianity over Islam faith in the countries or places that surrounded the Holy City- Israel. The people or the warriors who joined the crusades were of mixed reasons why they joined. Some really wanted to stand firm in the Christian belief and defend it. However, others who were sent by their lords to join may had different motives like for money, territory,, discoveries, etc. And because crusades were holy wars, many people have died; lost their money and properties in supporting it; and even the Roman Empire itself lost one or some of its territories and wealth.
Faith, Enlightenment and Science
This dark medieval period was a tumultuous time when small kingdoms fought for their existence and expansion. Apart from political struggles, people were also struggling for religious movements. Because of these struggles and a general environment of insecurity, people were forced to accept the tyrannical feudal system and serfdom.
During these political and religious conflicts, barbarians and Muslims invaded and conquered lands and devastated kingdoms. Because of all these serious issues, this period faced drastic reduction in literature, arts and cultural developments. During these religious conflicts, common men and women were ultimately drawn towards faith and beliefs and they sought after God. Many people opted for harsh rituals of the Catholic Church, cathedrals and monasteries, while other people opted for Orthodox forms of worship. Many intellectuals claim that the overall triumph of religion over reason itself suggests that this period was dark as it is a type of ‘darkness.’
According to these intellectuals, those people who followed religious beliefs were driven by organized lies and deceit. They were trapped in a false reality and were dominated by emotions and whims of papacy. They weren’t leading their lives based on logic, reason and fact. Gradually, people started to move away from religion towards the Age of Enlightenment when they opted for science and reason and gained progress. Various intellectuals like Kant and Voltaire vehemently criticized the religious periods of Middle Ages and claimed that it was a period of social regress.
The dark medieval period is called so, to express the idea that the situations and event of this particular period of history of Europe often seem to be ‘dark’ because of the paucity and lack of historical records which are in plenty for the earlier and later times.
COURSE TITLE : CRITICAL TRANSACTIONS
COURSE CODE : LEC 5104
TOPIC : MIDDLE AND DARK AGES
PREPARED BY : MUHAMED SHEHIN T.V
IST SEMESTER ECL
CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF KERALA
SUBMITTED TO : SHALINI MADAM
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
CENTRAL UNIVERSITY OF KERALA
DATE : 10-09-2015
MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE
The term Middle English literature refers to the literature written in the form of the English language known as Middle English, from the 12th century until the 1470s. During this time the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English became widespread and the printing press standardised the language. Between the 1470s and the middle of the following century there was a transition to early Modern English. In literary terms, the characteristics of the literary works written did not change drastically until the effects of the Renaissance and Reformed Christianity became more evident in the reign of King Henry VIII. There are three main categories of Middle English Literature: Religious, Courtly love, and Arthurian, though much of Geoffrey Chaucer's work stands outside these realms. Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle.
After the Norman conquest of England, Law French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and society. The Norman dialects of the ruling classes mixed with the Anglo-Saxon of the people and became Anglo-Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into Middle English. Around the turn of the thirteenth century, Layamon wrote in Middle English. Other transitional works were popular entertainment, including a variety of romances and lyrics. With time, the English language regained prestige, and in 1362 it replaced French and Latin in Parliament and courts of law. Early examples of Middle English literature are the Ormulum and Havelock the Dane. In the fourteenth century major works of English literature began once again to appear, including the works of Chaucer. The latter portion of the 14th century also saw not only the consolidation of English as a written language and a shift to secular writing. William Caxton printed four-fifths of his works in English, which helped to standardize the language and expand the vocabulary.
EARLY PERIOD
After the Norman conquest of England, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language continued in some monasteries but few literary works are known from this period. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, Law French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite society.
As the invaders integrated, their language and literature mingled with that of the natives. The Norman dialects of the ruling classes became Anglo-Norman, and Anglo-Saxon underwent a gradual transition into Middle English. Political power was no longer in English hands, so the West Saxon literary language had no more influence than any other dialect. Middle English literature is written, then, in the many dialects that correspond to the history, culture, and background of the individual writers.
It was with the fourteenth century that major works of English literature began once again to appear; these include the so-called Pearl Poet's Pearl, Patience, Cleanness, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; Langland's political and religious allegory Piers Plowman; John Gower's Confessio Amantis; and the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, the most highly regarded English poet of the Middle Ages, who was seen by his contemporaries as an English successor to the great tradition of Virgil and Dante.
The latter portion of the 14th century also saw not only the consolidation of English as a manuscript language, taking over from French or Latin in certain areas, but a paradigm shift from primarily theological or metaphysical subject matter to also include that of a more secular nature.
Vernacular book production saw a spurt in the amount of books being copied, both secular and religious. Thus, the latter portion of the 14th century can be seen as one of the most significant periods in the history of the English language.
Caxton and the English language
The first English printer, William Caxton, printed four-fifths of his works in English. He translated a large number of works into English; Caxton translated 26 of the titles himself. Caxton is credited with printing as many as 108 books, 87 of which were different titles. However, the English language was changing rapidly in Caxton's time and the works he was given to print were in a variety of styles and dialects. Caxton was a technician rather than a writer and he de Worde faced similar dilemmas.
Caxton is credited with standardising the English language (that is, homogenising regional dialects) through printing. This paved the way for the expansion of English vocabulary, the development of inflection and syntax and the ever-widening gap between the spoken and the written word.
THE DARK AGES
The Dark Ages is a historical term used originally for the Middle Ages, which underlines the cultural and economic decline that supposedly occurred in Western Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. The label uses traditional light-versus-darkness imagery to contrast the "darkness" of the period with earlier and later periods of "light". The period is marked by a relative scarcity of historical and other written records at least for some areas of Europe, rendering it unknown to historians. The term "Dark Age" derives from the Latin saeculum obscurum, originally applied by Caesar Baronius in 1602 to a turbulent period in the 10th and 11th centuries. The term once characterized the bulk of the Middle Ages, or roughly the 6th to 13th centuries, as a period of intellectual darkness between extinguishing the "light of Rome" after the end of Late Antiquity, and the rise of the Italian Renaissance in the 14th century. This definition is still widely used but increased recognition of the achievements of the Middle Ages has led to the label being restricted in scope. Since the 20th century, it is frequently applied to the earlier part of the era, the Early Middle Ages (c. 5th–10th century).However, many modern scholars who study the era tend to avoid the term altogether for its negative connotations, finding it out of place and inappropriate for any part of the Middle Ages.
The idea of a Dark Age evolved with the Italian scholar Petrarch in the 1330s, and was originally intended as a scathing criticism of the character of Late Latin literature. Petrarch regarded the post-Roman centuries as "dark" compared to the light of classical antiquity.Later historians expanded the term to refer to the transitional period between Roman times and the High Middle Ages (c. 11th–13th century), including the lack of Latin literature, and a lack of contemporary written history, general demographic decline, limited building activity and material cultural achievements in general.
Popular culture has further expanded on it as a vehicle to depict the early Middle Ages as a time of backwardness, extending its pejorative use and expanding its scope.
HISTORY
The term "Dark Ages" originally was intended to denote the entire period between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance; the term "Middle Ages" has a similar motivation, implying an intermediate period between Classical Antiquity and the Modern era. In the 19th century scholars began to recognize the accomplishments made during the period, thereby challenging the image of the Middle Ages as a time of darkness and decay. Now the term is not used by scholars to refer to the entire medieval period; when used, it is generally restricted to the Early Middle Ages.
The rise of archaeology in the 20th century has shed much light on the period and offered a more nuanced understanding of its positive developments. Other terms of periodization have come to the fore: Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages, and the Great Migrations, depending on which aspects of culture are being referred to. When modern scholarly study of the Middle Ages arose in the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was at first kept, with all its critical undercurrents. On the rare occasions when the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" because of the lack of artistic and cultural output, including historical records, when compared with both earlier and later times.
The idea of a Dark Age originated with Petrarch in the 1330s. Writing of those who had come before him, he said: "Amidst the errors there shone forth men of genius; no less keen were their eyes, although they were surrounded by darkness and dense gloom" Christian writers, including Petrarch himself had long used traditional metaphors of "light versus darkness" to describe "good versus evil". Petrarch was the first to co-opt the metaphor and give it secular meaning by reversing its application. Classical Antiquity, so long considered the "dark" age for its lack of Christianity, was now seen by Petrarch as the age of "light" because of its cultural achievements, while Petrarch's time, allegedly lacking such cultural achievements, was seen as the age of darkness.
During the Protestant Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries, Protestants wrote of the Middle Ages as a period of Catholic corruption. Just as Petrarch's writing was not an attack on Christianity per se — along with his humanism, he was deeply occupied with the search for God — neither was this an attack on Christianity: it was a drive to restore what Protestants saw as biblical Christianity.
The Magdeburg Centuries was a work of ecclesiastical history compiled by Lutheran scholars and published between 1559 and 1574. Devoting a volume to each century, it covered the first thirteen centuries of Christianity up to 1298. The work was virulently anti-Catholic. Identifying the Papacy as the Antichrist, it painted a "dark" picture of church history after the 5th century, characterizing it as "increments of errors and their corrupting influences".
In response to the Protestants, Roman Catholics developed a counter-image, depicting the High Middle Ages in particular as a period of social and religious harmony, and not "dark" at all. The most important Catholic reply to the Magdeburg Centuries was the Annales Ecclesiastici by Cardinal Caesar Baronius. Baronius was a trained historian who kept theology in the background and produced a work that the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1911 described as "far surpassing anything before his day" and that Acton regarded as "the greatest history of the Church ever written".The Annales, covering the first twelve centuries of Christianity up to 1198, was published in twelve volumes between 1588 and 1607. It was in Volume X that Baronius coined the term "dark age" for the period between the end of the Carolingian Empire in 888 and the first inklings of the Gregorian Reform under Pope Clement II in 1046.
In the 19th century, the term "Dark Ages" was widely used by historians. In 1860, in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt delineated the contrast between the "dark ages" of the medieval period and the more enlightened period of the Renaissance, which had revived the cultural and intellectual achievements of antiquity. However, the early 20th century saw a radical re-evaluation of the Middle Ages, and with it a calling into question of the terminology of darkness, or at least of its pejorative use. Historian Denys Hay exemplified this when he spoke ironically of "the lively centuries which we call dark".
When the term "Dark Ages" is used by historians today, therefore, it is intended to be neutral, namely, to express the idea that the events of the period often seem "dark" to us because of the paucity of historical records compared with both earlier and later times. The term is used in this sense (often in the singular) to reference the Bronze Age collapse and the subsequent Greek Dark Ages, the dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450-1863), and also a hypothetical Digital Dark Age which would ensue if the electronic documents produced in the current period were to become unreadable at some point in the future. Some Byzantinists have used the term "Byzantine Dark Ages" to refer to the period from the earliest Muslim conquests to about 800, because there are no extant historical texts in Greek from this period, and thus the history of the Byzantine Empire and formerly Byzantine territories that were conquered by the Muslims is poorly understood and must be reconstructed from other types of contemporaneous sources, such as religious texts. It is also known that very few Greek manuscripts were copied in this period, indicating that the 7th and 8th centuries, which were a period of crisis for the Byzantines because of the Muslim conquests, were also less intellectually active than other periods. The term "dark age" is not restricted to the discipline of history. Since the archaeological evidence for some periods is abundant and for others scanty, there are also archaeological dark ages.
WHY THE MIDDLE AGES ARE GENERALLY REFERRED TO AS THE DARK AGE
The Fall of the Great Roman Empire
Rome during this time was the greatest empire in the world. Its scope was very wide with the help of their great leaders such as Julius Caesar, Augustus Aurelius, and many other great Roman leaders. However, time came when there were no more leaders like them, Rome slow down and its economy and the whole system of the entire empire fell down. Many problems arise like no able leaders, corruption, civil wars, and most importantly was the barbarian invasions. These barbarian invasions of the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, etc. from Germany and from North Europe just entered and invaded Rome when the empire itself was already weak. So, this event makes the Middle Ages dark because of so many chaos.
The Crusades
Crusades were also the Holy wars led by the popes in the Roman Empire with the aim of preserving Christianity over Islam faith in the countries or places that surrounded the Holy City- Israel. The people or the warriors who joined the crusades were of mixed reasons why they joined. Some really wanted to stand firm in the Christian belief and defend it. However, others who were sent by their lords to join may had different motives like for money, territory,, discoveries, etc. And because crusades were holy wars, many people have died; lost their money and properties in supporting it; and even the Roman Empire itself lost one or some of its territories and wealth.
Faith, Enlightenment and Science
This dark medieval period was a tumultuous time when small kingdoms fought for their existence and expansion. Apart from political struggles, people were also struggling for religious movements. Because of these struggles and a general environment of insecurity, people were forced to accept the tyrannical feudal system and serfdom.
During these political and religious conflicts, barbarians and Muslims invaded and conquered lands and devastated kingdoms. Because of all these serious issues, this period faced drastic reduction in literature, arts and cultural developments. During these religious conflicts, common men and women were ultimately drawn towards faith and beliefs and they sought after God. Many people opted for harsh rituals of the Catholic Church, cathedrals and monasteries, while other people opted for Orthodox forms of worship. Many intellectuals claim that the overall triumph of religion over reason itself suggests that this period was dark as it is a type of ‘darkness.’
According to these intellectuals, those people who followed religious beliefs were driven by organized lies and deceit. They were trapped in a false reality and were dominated by emotions and whims of papacy. They weren’t leading their lives based on logic, reason and fact. Gradually, people started to move away from religion towards the Age of Enlightenment when they opted for science and reason and gained progress. Various intellectuals like Kant and Voltaire vehemently criticized the religious periods of Middle Ages and claimed that it was a period of social regress.
The dark medieval period is called so, to express the idea that the situations and event of this particular period of history of Europe often seem to be ‘dark’ because of the paucity and lack of historical records which are in plenty for the earlier and later times.
No comments:
Post a Comment